Human Resources
Volunteerism

Why Does America Need the Cajun Navy?

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Why Does America Need the Cajun Navy?


Ben Theriot, a member of the volunteer Cajun Navy, searches for people in need of help after Hurricane Harvey.Photograph by Edmund D. Fountain / NYT via Redux

Among the heroes of Hurricane Harvey have been hundreds of volunteer boaters, members of the so-called Cajun Navy and other similar groups, who have patrolled the flooded streets of Houston in their own boats, pulling stranded families off of roofs and bringing them to shelter. Along the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes happen every year, the tradition of citizen boat rescue goes back generations, but a more modern form of the practice developed last August, during a spate of catastrophic floods around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when people in danger began posting messages seeking help on a Cajun Navy Facebook page. A man named Shawn Boudreaux eventually convinced everyone to start using a walkie-talkie app called Zello, which gave the operation some organization and ability to scale. This week, Boudreaux, who works banquets at fancy New Orleans hotels, was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a hundred and fifty miles east of Houston, helping to prepare local boaters for a wing of Harvey that materialized only after the storm pummelled Texas. He spent much of what spare time he had on Zello, monitoring the volunteer rescue efforts across the state line. The Cajun Navy had expanded, and the size of this spontaneous, self-organizing response, and the sacrifices of the citizen volunteers, he told me by phone, “was pretty amazing to see.”

Harvey is now ebbing. The sun is out in Houston. And the stories of the storm are consolidating, much as they did following the floods last year in Baton Rouge, around the failures of the government’s preparations and response to the disaster, and the successes of private individuals’ rescue efforts. The news on Thursday morning is of two large explosions at a chemical plant northeast of Houston. Last year, the Houston Chronicle published a series of articles about the vulnerabilities of the city’s chemical industry and the ways in which the industry’s lobbyists had defeated the Obama Administration’s regulatory efforts. (One part of the investigation was titled “An Industry Left to Police Itself.”) Harvey, like other great Gulf Coast storms of recent years, has also made clear the insufficiency of the National Flood Insurance Program, which is designed to manage building in flood-prone areas but which has wound up encouraging vast development in areas too risky for private insurers to support. The hurricane’s destruction has, as well, underscored the insufficiency of Houston’s city planning (“Boomtown, Flood Town” was the title of a prescient report last year by the Texas Tribune and ProPublica) and the inadequacy of the reservoirs built to manage flooding (“If the Addicks and Barker Dams Fail” was the headline of a sharp Houston Press report published five years ago). Behind everything, escalating the stakes, is the willful ignorance of climate change that many local and national political leaders still cling to. In contrast to this, the actions of the Cajun Navy and other groups are celebrated. The heroism of the boaters is so vivid and so moving that it obscures the most important question about them: Why are they so needed in the first place?

This winter, I spent time in Denham Springs, Louisiana, at the home of a woman named Teressa Bell, who is in her seventies and lives with her daughter Donna. Donna has been a quadriplegic since the age of fifteen, when she was in a car accident. One morning last August, when a historic accumulation of rain caused the nearby Amite River to surge, the ground floor of the Bells’ home filled up with water, nearly to the ceiling, in the course of an hour. Teressa and her son carried Donna up to the second floor and laid her at the top of the stairs, on a sheet, where she laid her head against the floor and watched the water rising, step by step. She heard the floodwaters pull the refrigerator from the wall and throw it around the kitchen. A friend of the Bells contacted a boater named Kevin Lawson, who was out trying to help people, and asked him to check on the Bells. He arrived, and pulled Donna, wrapped in a sheet, off the second-floor landing of the house, just as the flood was on the verge of swallowing it.

Of the hundred and fifty thousand Louisiana homes that were washed out by the great rains of 2016, the vast majority–eighty-two per cent—were not insured against floods. The Bells’ home was in this majority. When I met the family this winter, their house was stripped to the studs, moldy and uninhabitable, and their damaged belongings were being held in a little trailer in the driveway. The Bells themselves were living in a white trailer supplied by fema (after storms, the agency deposits them on the lawns of the flooded, like condolence boxes), which they were entitled to use for only eighteen months. They did not know what they would do after fema took the trailer back. They had exhausted the generosity of family and friends, and their house, which represented much of their savings, was worth much less than it had been—the market was saturated with similarly damaged properties. They had been rescued, but, like many others in the Baton Rouge area, they were, in deeper ways, still stranded.

After the floods, the Cajun Navy became heroes in Baton Rouge. Newspapers celebrated them; they were the grand marshals of local parades; the lieutenant governor of Louisiana took a special interest in their project. There were hundreds of families like the Bells, who felt that they owed their safety not to the distant forces of government but to a neighbor who had put himself at risk to help them. There was a social elegance in the idea that working-class families were rescued by working-class heroes in boats, in episodes that not always, but sometimes, cut across racial lines. “Floodwaters don’t discriminate,” was a slogan that circulated after the Baton Rouge floods.

At the time, the Baton Rouge floods seemed like they might trigger a greater awakening to the chaos of climate change. Now they seem a prelude to Harvey. In Texas, too, there has been devastation, and then heroism, and there will be, surely, a longer-gestating devastation to come. There is a cyclic pattern to the erosion of faith in government, in which politics saps the state’s capacity to protect people, and so people put their trust in other institutions (churches; self-organizing volunteer navies), and are more inclined to support anti-government politics. The stories of the storm and the navies exist on a libertarian skeleton. Through them, a particular idea of how society might be organized is coming into view.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.Read more » More:Hurricane Harvey